shewhomust | "I would be happy to contribute to literature by giving you a lavender hat."

On Thursday

durham_rambler and I went into Cambridge to spend the day with

nineweaving. J. took us to the bus stop, and we rode the bus past the garden centre offering 'Mums, Asters, Cabbages and Kale' (like a forgotten nursery rhyme), past Myopia Street (why would you call a street that?) to Alewife, a town named after a herring and the end of the red line of the T.

nineweaving escorted us past the Old Burial Ground, with its notices forbidding loitering between dusk and dawn, in and out of all the best chocolate shops, to TeaLuxe where we sniffed three different grades of Earl Grey and selected one for the afternoon's tea-party, into Harvard Yard where Anthropology students were investigating The Archaeology of Harvard Yard (and digging up lots of clay pipes), a tour of the wonderful Widener Library (with its Gutenberg Bible, as crisp and clean as if it were fresh off the press).

Eventually we returned to

nineweaving's flat, just in time to welcome

rushthatspeaks. The tea party was all that a tea party should be: delightful company, stimulating conversation, light, clear, citrussy Earl Grey that gave me a whole new appreciation of what Earl Grey is about, local strawberries with crème fraîche, all under the aegis of an overmantel laden with blue and white china.

The time flew by, and soon we were back on the T, where we stayed for some time, as the train limped home; which gave us time to agree that the hat was in fact not lavender but silver, but that this would not reduce its contribution to literature.

I had woken that morning with a sore throat, and hoped it was simply a result of shouted conversations in a noisy restaurant the night before; but during the day I became more and more snuffly, and by yesterday I had a streaming cold. I spent much of the day in bed, and I think the treatment is working. I was well enough to go out to dinner with

sunspiral and

roozle - fortunately. because I would have hated to miss it! They made us very welcome, and served us all-American favourites: ribs, and apple pie, and bonus pumpkin loaf; I didn't have the stamina for ice cream...